Above the Thunder

An extraordinary memoir of an aviator’s service in the Pacific Theater

“If you’re looking for macho, fighting-man talk, you’ve picked up the wrong book. . . . This is just an honest narration of some of my experiences . . . during my service in the U.S. Army between 1940 and 1945.”—Raymond C. Kerns

The son of a Kentucky tobacco farmer, Raymond Kerns dropped out of high school after the eighth grade to help on the farm. He enlisted in the Army in 1940 and, after training as a radio operator in the artillery, was assigned to Schofield Barracks (Oahu) where he witnessed the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and participated in the ensuing battle.

In the months before Pearl Harbor, Kerns had passed the Army’s flight training admission exam with flying colors. But because he lacked a high school diploma, the Army refused to give him flying lessons. Undaunted, Private Kerns took lessons with a civilian flying school and was actually scheduled for his first solo flight on the afternoon of December 7, 1941.

Notwithstanding his lack of diploma, Kerns graduated from Officer Candidate School and then completed flight training in the L-4 Piper Cub in late 1942. He was assigned to the 33rd Infantry Division in New Guinea and saw extensive combat service there and in the Philippines. In a simple but riveting style, Kerns recalls flying multiple patrols over enemy-held territory in his light unarmored plane, calling and coordinating artillery strikes. While his most effective defense was the remarkable maneuverability and nimbleness of the L-4, he was often required to defend himself with pistols and rifles, hand grenades, and even a machine gun that he welded to his landing gear and once used to blow up an ammunition dump.

Proud of his service and convinced of the effectiveness and cost efficiency of the L-4 pilots in the Pacific and Europe, Kerns earned the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Silver Star.

Above the Thunder, arguably one of the best memoirs of combat action during World War II, will appeal to military historians as well as general readers.

Contents

Illustrations

A Note on the Language

Preface and Acknowledgments

If you’re looking for macho, fighting-man talk, you’ve picked up the
wrong book. As you may guess when looking at my photos, I’m not
that kind of fellow. And you won’t find lurid romance or exaggerated
dramatization of fairly ordinary events—I hope. Not that I don’t like
drama, I just can’t write it.
This is just an honest narration of some of my experiences, observations,
thoughts, and acquaintances...

Introduction: The Heroic Liaison Pilots of World War II
and the Amazing Piper Cub L-4

Lt. Col. Raymond R. Kerns has written here what I believe to be one of the finest memoirs to come out of World War II. He witnessed and participated in some extraordinary events, including the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and he has the writing skills to bring them to life for us. One of the historians who reviewed the manuscript for the publisher ...

Prologue

One summer afternoon in 1927, when I was six years old, I was playing
under some black locust trees just across the dusty pike from our farm
home near Buzzard Roost in Nicholas County, Kentucky. (Well, the legal
name of the little crossroads was Sprout, but since early settlement times
it had been called Buzzard Roost, and so it is to this day, and it’s on my
birth certificate.) Anyway,...

1 The Pineapple Soldier

According to accounts I’ve read, he was Lt. Akira Sakamoto. I can envision
him pulling his flying goggles down over his eyes, hastily rechecking
the “ready” switches for guns and bombs, and rolling his Aichi-99
into a howling plunge toward Wheeler Field. Behind him twenty-five
more dive-bombers from the Imperial Japanese Navy’s aircraft carrier
Zuikaku began peeling off to follow him down...

2 Ninety-Day Wonders and Fair-Haired Boys

In 1942, soldiers didn’t jet about the world in plush seats, waited on
by lovely stewardesses. They carried their duffel bags up a gangplank
and down into the dank depths of some ship that had been fitted out to
accommodate the maximum number of men with minimum consideration
of comfort, and that smelled like somebody’s dirty socks. We spent
about a week between Honolulu and San Francisco...

3 Kauai to Fortification Point

The 33d Division’s mission in the Territory of Hawaii was twofold: to
provide defense of the western islands and to continue its preparation
for service elsewhere in the Pacific theater. Kauai, “The Garden Isle,”
westernmost
of the major islands of Hawaii, was a choice location.
On Kauai, the 122d FA Bn put HQ and HQ Btry...

4 Tornado Task Force

There is nothing at all in my memory about our leaving Fortification
Point, but we did, sometime along about the end of August 1944. I recall
being aboard an LST, one of several that were shoving through sunny
blue seas toward the northwest along New Guinea’s long coast, while
off to port was a bank of clouds beneath which I could see wet, forested
hills. One of those people who always knows...

5 Luzon: Lingayen to the Hills

Our Liberty ship lay at anchor off Wakde all through the dark night after
we boarded her. Among several officers of battalion headquarters there
was a big game of Black Lady Hearts that night. I was the scorekeeper,
and, just for the hell of it, I kept the score in Japanese numerals. When
anyone wanted to know the score, I told him.
Capt. Norman Olsen, our assistant S-3, consistently lost, and although
there was no money involved, losing...

6 Over the Hills to Baguio

The nearer we came to Hill 3000, the harder the enemy resisted our
advance. We got the Footstool, and there we sat. Assault after assault
met with defeat, in spite of heroic efforts by some of the best of Colonel
Serff’s infantrymen. Army Air Force P-38s clobbered the knob with bombs
and napalm until it was just a scorched and desolate pile of dirt into
which the 122d poured tons of HE shell...

7 Sashaying Around Up North

General Clarkson set up his headquarters in the old Baguio Country Club
building, and for the first time since Hawaii the air section people got
inside a real house. It was a small frame schoolhouse near the Kennon
Road and within a couple of hundred yards of the west end of Loacan
Field. A shell had collapsed one corner, and the roof there touched the
floor, but we made ourselves...

Epilogue

At least until Mikhail Gorbachev’s ascension to power in the Soviet
Union, the Cold War dominated international affairs after the end of
World War II. Twice it escalated into shooting wars involving the United
States, and in those wars many veterans went back to combat zones in
Korea and Vietnam. I was one of those.
When I landed after my...

Welcome to Project MUSE

Use the simple Search box at the top of the page or the Advanced Search linked from the top of the page to find book and journal content. Refine results with the filtering options on the left side of the Advanced Search page or on your search results page. Click the Browse box to see a selection of books and journals by: Research Area, Titles A-Z, Publisher, Books only, or Journals only.